It's about time I gave an account of how my passion for Gypsy music started. And so I present this chapter from my forthcoming memoir, Slovakian Rhapsody, in which I see a musical back in 1991 when I was teaching English in a college preparatory school. The film mentioned is the source of some of the photos around my site, such as the one of Zobar and the girl leading the horse above. The pic below is from the program. I now sing and play on guitar four songs from the show. Please also see the video of one of them at the end.

Chapter 16: Gypsies go to Heaven

The foyer of Martin’s Theater of the Slovak National Uprising was full of chatter and cigarette smoke, broken up by occasional blasts of cold as patrons tramped in off the street, shaking snow from their boots. Otherwise, it was toasty inside, thanks to the bounty of cheap natural gas the Soviet Union still pumped into its former satellites. Alena, my colleague of forty, with light-blonde pixie, pale round face, and thin lips, waited in line with me at the coat check. We understood there was nothing romantic about this outing. She had a “friendship” with the computer science teacher; tonight she was just helping the foreigner get out for a bit of culture.

Once seated, I looked over the program, whose cover read: “Cigáni idú do neba,” “Gypsies go to Heaven.”

It was full of black-and-white images of Gypsy children in ramshackle dwellings. The photos had been manipulated—dark with the edges of faces and other objects brightened, almost like negatives. Black is white and white is black?

“It is based on tale by Maxim Gorky,” said Alena.

Uh-oh, commie stuff. Still, after all the ideologies I’d been exposed to in college, nothing could brainwash me, right?

“It was very popular Soviet film in 1977,” she continued.

“The same year Star Wars came out. I was eleven then, crazy about astronomy and spaceships.”

“Oh, yes, I have heard of this film. Anyway, Gypsies go to Heaven is very well known for its music.”

“Makes sense, given their reputation as strolling violinists.” The only other thing I knew about Roma is that they were originally from India and, according to legend, hadn’t ceased their nomadic ways since leaving home to entertain at a sultan’s banquet. And of course they had a reputation for fortunetelling and thievery. The only Roma I’d encountered thus far worked as street sweepers or black-market moneychangers. There had to be more to this mysterious race.

The lights went down and a farm wagon wobbled onstage, its wooden slats poking up like bare ribs on a supine skeleton. Children in ragged clothes jostled inside, as women in long flowered skirts and men in red silk shirts pushed it along. Two men strummed gut-stringed guitars, accompanying female voices which rang out in a sweet but doleful melody, but after two short verses the music faded, the wagon exited, and a group of men remained on stage.

Hanka, as Alena was known by her Slovak diminutive, occasionally leaned her head to whisper a paraphrase of the action. “The main character is Zobar. He is horse thief.” Uniformed men marched onstage, rifles slung over their shoulders. “They are Austro-Hungarian soldiers,” she continued.

As the Gypsy men fled, a sudden flash of light and the crack of a gunshot made the audience gasp. Zobar stumbled off to stage right. The curtain fell, and a whiff of acrid gunpowder reached my nose. In the next vignette, a beautiful young woman tended to Zobar’s wound. The lights dimmed to the sound of crickets, simulating nightfall. After a brief silence, the lights came up again. Zobar awoke, alone but miraculously healed.
A couple of scenes later, a handful of women and girls entered wearing huge, colorful scarves tied at the corners around their waists. Too light-skinned to be Roma, but they had the audience clapping to the lively refrain:

That’s no misprint. It was 1992, before the Czech-Slovak split. In one pic you can even see a portrait of then-President Václav Havel on the wall. (That's me with the beard and red sweater.)

It was in the club room of the college-preparatory school where I taught English. I’d told the seniors about Valentine’s Day celebrations in the U.S. and had them make cards. They suggested we have a party, and of course I obliged. One of my fondest memories from 25 years ago.

It’s probably my shortest entry to date in terms of word count, but I think the pics say it all.

’m going to re-start my blog, after a considerable absence, with a round-up of things.

First, an explanation of that absence: In addition to copious rehearsals for my role as vineyard foreman Pasquale in the musical The Most Happy Fellow, I’ve worked very intensively on a translation project. Both projects suit my travel passion. In MHF, I sing and speak in Italian, as Pasquale is an Italian immigrant to the Napa Valley in the 1920s.​The translation, for a private client, had to do with a part of Austria-Hungary that is today part of Italy. As a result of frequent Google searches for locations that were once part of Austria-Hungary’s fortifications against Italy in the mountain passes near Trent, I came across these pics, made by an old method called “photochrom,” of the old empire on the Library of Congress website.

Two and a half years ago, on a trip around the former Austria-Hungary for the centenary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, I spent three nights in Zagreb. Now I come across this recommendation of two off-the-tourist-track sites in the Croatian capital. I must confess, I missed the Maksimir Park and will have to see it on a return trip.

The other sight of interest is the Mirogoj Cemetery. I didn’t see that one either in 2014, but I’d visited it in 1995 while travelling by bus with a Slovak chorus. That trip involved performances with two choirs with whom we had exchanges: one from Trent, Italy, the other from Križevci, Croatia.

Being shown around the cemetery by Croats lent particular depth to the experience. Though I have no Slavic ancestry, I’d lived in Slovakia enough by then to have a strong sense of the struggles of these two Slav nations for their identity, the right to an education in their own tongue, and other forms of autonomy within the Habsburg Empire. More specifically, both were part of the Kingdom of Hungary, and often got the short end of the stick, as that entity was dominated by Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) nobility.

Two of the most important figures buried in Mirogoj are Ljudevit Gaj and Janko Drašković, who founded the Illyrian movement, largely as a reaction to the Hungarian Diet making Magyar the official language of Croatia in the late 1820s. In addition to buttressing the rights of Croats, the movement sought greater solidarity among South Slavs (including Serbs, Slovenes, and others). In a way, it was an extension of the pan-Slavist movement started by Slovaks such as Adam Franz Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik. So my Slovak friends in the chorus were quite sympathetic.

One of the graves we stopped at was that of Stjepan Radić, founder of the Croatian Peasant Party, who was assassinated in the Yugoslav Parliament in 1928 by a Serbian radical. (He actually succumbed to the injury several weeks after the shooting.) Curiously, we saw it when the Balkan Wars were still going on, though there was a lull in the fighting in the area at the time. But I couldn't help but think that all the flowers placed on his grave at the time were there because it was a time when Croats didn't just honor him, but also recalled his killing as the work of a demonized enemy.

Finally, I couldn’t help reflecting on my main college job as a bellman at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Boar’s Head Inn, when I read this article at Conde Nast Traveller. We at the Boar's Head didn't have such a lingo of our own, but managers did speak of going out onto the floor as something akin to going onstage. That said, I'll get back to practicing my lines for The Most Happy Fella!